When you dance, I wish you
A wave o’ th’ sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that; more still, still so,
And own no other function.

(IV.iv.140-143) The Winter’s Tale

William Shakespeare

The White House is hosting a new dance series.  First up – a tribute to Judith Jamison, outgoing Artistic Director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

Thanks Mrs. O!

hat tip:  the ballet bag

Don’t forget to head down to Millennium Park tomorrow evening to see the Chicago Dancing Festival.  RB is really looking forward to seeing Trinity (Joffrey) and Serenade (Ballet West) on the Pritzker stage.  Add to that Alvin Ailey II, Battleworks, Royal Ballet and Mark Morris Dance Group and it is sure to be a night to remember.  Bummed to have missed Lar Lubovitch Dance Co (but they’ll be back in Sept!), the fabulous Miss Wendy Whelan and Kanji Segawa.

It’s so  exciting to have this much world-class dance right here!  Thanks to festival founders Lar Lubovitch, Jay Franke and David Herro for their wonderful contribution to our city.  The three will be recognized at a pre-show ceremony and receive the Ruth Page Award on Saturday.  Congrats on your well-deserved acknowledgement!

Lar Lubovitch Dance Company. Dancers: Jonathan Alsberry, Jay Franke, Attila Csiki. Photo by Todd Rosenberg.

World-class dance hits Chicago this week!  Not that we don’t already have those bragging rights with our local plethora of top-notch dance companies, but this week the Chicago Dancing Festival brings together an eclectic group of artists from across the country and, for the first time in the festival’s history, an international presence represented by dancers from the Royal Ballet of London.  The festival kicks off its fourth year with a benefit performance on Wednesday and continues with free shows at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance (Thurs),  the Museum of Contemporary Art (Friday) and the Pritzker Pavillion at Millennium Park (Saturday).

With only one Chicago-based company performing this year (The Joffrey Ballet), founders Lar Lubovitch and Jay Franke recruited their dream cast with a specific goal in mind — to cultivate a new audience.  “There are people in the audience that are huge dance lovers and follow everything that happens in the city, but we’re programming more toward that new audience,” says Franke.  “We want them to have the best that’s out there.  We’ve utilized a lot of the Chicago companies in the past.  We start every year fresh and try to compose the best program.”  On the program this year is a giant range of styles.  The Modern Masters program includes choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, Paul Taylor, Lar Lubovitch, Mark Morris and newly named Artistic Director of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater (he takes over next July), Robert Battle, while the Celebration of Dance that closes the fest includes more classical works from Balanchine and Sir Kenneth MacMillan.

RB talked with Founder/Artistic Director Jay Franke, a former dancer with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Twyla Tharp and Lar Lubovitch Dance Company and Julliard grad, about the history of the festival and what he’s looking forward to seeing this week.

RB:  Why did you start the festival?  How did it come about?

JF: Lar (Lubovitch) and my partner, David (Herro) and I were out to dinner one night and were talking about what we felt was missing with dance in Chicago.  We really felt that Chicago was missing a large-scale dance festival.  We obviously knew there were smaller festivals here that were more geared toward the local dance companies, but we felt that if we could create a larger platform for dance in the city, we could grow a new audience, which was really our first goal.  There’s a new audience out there…or maybe the new audience is the Joffrey audience that is now going to see Hubbard Street or Melissa Thodos or Gus Giordano, so we’re kind of cross-pollinating the different company’s audiences.  Early on, the idea was a festival.  We felt in order to make it user-friendly, that it needed to be free.  As Lar often says he wanted everyone invited to the party.  If we’re going to create this festival and then charge $30 a ticket, it’s counterproductive.  We set our sights on Millennium Park early on.  I also felt that if we wanted to start this giant venture, we needed an artistic institution behind us.

RB:  Is that the Chicago Dancing Company?

JF:  We formed the Chicago Dancing Company first, then we searched and shopped for an artistic institution – and we weren’t necessarily looking for a dance institution – and came across Peter Taub and Greg Cameron at the MCA.  We told them about this idea we had to start a festival and they were immediately interested in it because one of the missions of the MCA was to grow outside of the museum walls and they felt that by them contributing to us, they could get us a meeting with Millennium Park to pitch the idea, which we did.  At that time, Helen Doria was running the programming.  The hope was to do this in 2008 and this was maybe January 2007.  Helen grabs the calendar and says, “We’ve been looking for a great dance opportunity – we’re doing it now!”  She gave us a Wednesday night in the middle of August and it was up to Lar and myself to come up with the programming.

The first year, we had our one night and we had over 8,000 people there.  It was the most frightening experience of my career.  It really was.  It was my first time to be on that side of the curtain.  It’s completely out of your control.  The weather was a threat that year.  We didn’t know how many people were going to be there.  We’d done all that we could as far as our funds could take us with publicity.  We had some great stories written in the papers, but didn’t really have the money to splash ads everywhere so, through some higher calling or higher being, it went off without a hitch.  It was exciting and electrifying for me to just be there and be in that moment for the first time.

RB:  Are you dancing in this year’s festival?

JF:  No.  I’m actually slowing down as a dancer.  I find myself less and less interested in dance as a dancer.  Things are starting to hurt now.  I always say to myself that I never want to be in that place where I’m going on stage and all I can think about is getting through the pain to get to what I love doing.  Let’s face it, dance is about being young and feeling good.  Plus, the festival occupies the bulk of my time.  It used to be just a couple of months in the summer, but now it’s more like a full-time job.

New York City Ballet artists Sebastien Marcovici and Wendy Whelan. Photo by Todd Rosenberg.

RB: What’s it like working with Lar?

JF:  He’s great.  He’s a mentor to me.  You get to know someone artistically in a studio, but until you start working side-by-side with them and see why they make the choices they make…obviously Lar has so many great contacts in the dance world and has such a great reputation.  When the idea was first initiated, he was the one that called companies.  Now, we have companies calling us because they want to be a part of it.  It’s a very cool experience.  I’ve been in class in New York next to dancers that have danced on our stage and they thank me and say it was the most incredible experience.  Especially at the Pritzker, for them to dance for that amount of people on that architecturally beautiful stage…and the view from the stage is phenomenal.  You can see the Modern Wing and all of Michigan Avenue.

RB:  You never think about what the dancers are seeing.  What pieces are you most excited about this year?

JF:  I’m most excited about the largeness of the works we’re presenting.  The Mark Morris Dance Group, Serenade (Ballet West) is with 26 dancers…these are large pieces.  Every year we learn from what we’ve done.  Not that we make mistakes, because we feel like every year presents a different challenge for us.  I felt like last year we left thinking we did smaller pieces and that we should do larger-scale pieces.  Also, this year we’re doing something a little different with our format.  We’re presenting the same company twice.  The Mark Morris Dance Group will perform Thursday and Saturday doing two different works.  I think the idea of the larger-scale companies is what I’m most excited about…seeing those companies take the stage.  The Paul Taylor piece that Julliard (School Dance Ensemble) is doing – I’ve watched them in rehearsal, they’re just the most dynamic group of individuals – it’s a great opportunity for them to be on the same stage with Wendy Whelan (of the New York City Ballet).  It’s huge for them. There’s a lot of large opportunity for all of these companies this year and for the audience to experience the bigger companies.

RB:  You’ve had a pretty amazing career (Julliard, Twyla, Hubbard Street, Lar’s company)…did you start out taking ballet classes?

JF:  Tap.  I wanted to be Fred Astaire.  (Laughs.)  Then I switched to Gene Kelly and back to Fred Astaire.  I couldn’t make up my mind.  My Mom and Dad were so supportive from the beginning.  “You want to be a dancer?  Sure!”  My 90-year-old grandmother still thinks I’m a tap dancer.  When I dance for Twyla or whoever and she comes to see me she says, “That was the best tap dance I’ve ever seen!”  Yes, it was Nana.

Tickets to the MCA and Harris Theater shows sold out quickly, but you can still venture down to Millennium Park for Saturday’s Celebration of Dance.  The performance starts at 7:30 and is guaranteed to be some of the best dancing — non-tap — you’ve ever seen.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaI1XOB-bs&feature=player_embedded]

Thoughts?

It’s gala time!  For 19 years, Keith Elliott and Chicago Dancers United have produced the premier dance fundraising event, Dance for Life.  For one evening only — Saturday, August 21, dancers from some of Chicago’s top companies (Ensemble Español Spanish Dance Theatre, Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, The Joffrey Ballet, River North Chicago Dance Company and Thodos Dance Chicago) will perform at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance to raise money for HIV/AIDS care.

Back for the 19th year as well is audience-favorite Dean Richards (WGN-TV, WGN Radio, WGN America and NewsTalk 720, etc.) as Master of Ceremonies.  The up-for-anything entertainment critic has upped his own ante by performing hilarious opening skits in years past.  Switching things up this year though, is a top secret finale choreographed by local legend Harrison McEldowney, who often contributes his witty talents to the raffle portion of the show.  Randy Duncan, who has choreographed the finale since 1994, will be back next year with a grand finale to celebrate the 20th anniversary.

Beneficiaries of the nearly $4 million raised so far from Dance for Life are:  AIDS Foundation of Chicago, Brothers Health Collective, Chicago Child Care Society, Centro Romero, Dance for Life Fund, Tongabezi Trust School and the Young Women’s Empowerment Project.  “The school is a big deal,” says Elliott.  “We give them only $5000 a year.  They created a community AIDS Awareness Day.  They do education in the community.  It is just one school and there are hundreds, but they really made a big deal with the money…$5000 goes a long way.”  Also in the works is a documentary filming project.

RB caught up with the very busy and ever-jovial Keith Elliott to talk about the largest performance-based AIDS fundraising event in the Midwest.

RB:  Tell me how this all got started.

KE:  It all started…really 20 years ago, I was dancing for Joseph Holmes Chicago Dance Theater and we started getting laid off for the summer and didn’t want to have a bunch of down time, so I started creating a concept of a concert to raise money.

RB:  Did you already know what you wanted to raise money for?

KE:  No.  It was just an idea that I wanted to raise money.  It felt natural to do it for AIDS, because there really wasn’t anything at the time that the dance community was doing.

RB:  Was Joseph still alive?

KE:  No, he had died by that time.  I got a hold of Todd Kiech and said, “I can’t do this by myself!”  Todd came aboard and we thought we’d just put on our own choreography so we’d have a show.  Then I reached out to Harriet Ross, who was the Assoc Dir of Joseph Holmes at the time.  I knew she had a lot of good ideas and connections and I said, “here’s my idea…what do you think?”  She said, “Well, the choreography sucks!” in her nicest, Jewish way.  “You should call up the big guys if you want to do a fundraiser.”  I didn’t know I could do that.  So she said, “Let’s go!”  We went into her office and started calling.  Everyone said yes, yes, yes!  We found a date that worked and it sold out.

RB:  You have a Spanish dance company that is performing this year.  How do you decide who gets to perform?

KE:  We’ve streamlined a little bit, so we have four anchor companies now.  (Joffrey, River North, Gus Giordano and Hubbard Street).  What we tried to do was create an opening slot for ethnic-type companies…this year we bring in Ensemble Español.

RB:  Do you have a competition?

KE:  It’s an adjudication process. They submit a tape of the piece that they want and I compile them on a dvd and send it out to three dance critics in the city.  They know all the other companies, so we just ask them to look at the piece that is being submitted and really create a flow for the evening.

RB:  Tell me about the documentary.

KE:  It’s in the infancy stages.  Right now we’re just trying to find out if we can get the money.  We’re going to have to depend on a lot of angels real fast, because if it happens…Scott Silberstein from HMS Media, of course they are an Emmy Award-winning media firm…we’re working with them to make it happen pretty quickly.

RB:  You would do it this year?

KE:  Yes, film now for next year, then piece it together do all of the interviews.  It’ll kick off probably in March next year (whenever sweeps are not) and then we’ll be able to air it to kick off our 20^th year.  We’ve already met with WTTW to try and get several airing dates.  What we’d like to do is throw a viewing party to help raise money.  The biggest thing about Dance for Life is that it needs to outreach more, because you need to make more and more people aware of the cause and the necessity for money.  We have a couple of youth programs and we thought, why don’t we set up viewing parties at local schools.  They pay a dollar, they get to view the tape and we send out somebody from Joffrey or Hubbard Street, dancers that would be proactive and feel good about the cause and what we’re trying to do.  They could maybe teach a master class for 30 minutes.  We’re trying to devise something to get them out there to heighten awareness on AIDS support and raise a little money.  If the kids pay a dollar, it makes them feel philanthropic and they learn how to give.  So, we’re working on that too.  It will all be based around the documentary.

RB:  What have been some of your favorite memories…either from the shows or behind the scenes?

KE:  The first memory was “oh my…it’s going to be a lot of work!”  We went in to the Organic Theater, and not being technically savvy, we brought aboard a girl from Barat College, she did all the tech stuff up there…we got to the theater the day of the show and all of the cords for all the lights were just in a pile.  We spent hours just undoing the cords, then we had to plug in the lights, etc.  At that point, I saw how you really have to prep every little thing.  That was a learning curve that went real fast!  The light at the end of this tunnel was when I opened the door and looked around the block and screamed “Sold Out!”, everybody was booing, but in a good way and saying,  “we’ll be back next year!”

My favorite memory from the shows is just seeing everybody back stage…how they mingle and mix, when normally they wouldn’t or wouldn’t have the opportunity to.  Everybody’s really cool, they’re there for the same purpose and I love, love, love the fact that they get it…that they’re donating their time to help raise money.  A lot of them don’t realize we’re funding the school in Africa and its AIDS programs, we’re supporting yearly four health organizations here in the city — the main one being the AIDS Foundation.

Ticket are still available.  For more information, please call 312.922.5812 or visit www.danceforlifechicago.com.

Suzanne Farrell, most commonly known as George Balachine’s muse, turns 65 today!

Former ballet superstar of ABT, NYCB and the Royal Ballet, Gelsey Kirkland and her husband, Michael Chernov are opening a new ballet school in NYC!  Read the WSJ article here.

The Sadler Wells Theatre in London has released the shortlist of contestants for their Global Dance Contest.  Click here to watch the videos and vote for your favorite.

You only get one vote, so vote your heart.  RB‘s heart is with friend and former Joffrey dancer Matthew Prescott’s This Heart (video title is incorrect on site).  Love it!

You would be hard pressed to find anyone more passionate about the art of tap dance than Lane Alexander.  Founder and Director of the Chicago HumanRhythm Project , he boasts a resumé as a globe-trotting tapper that is ridiculously long and studded with accomplishments like performing at Carnegie Hall, dancing with Austin on Tap, the Candlelight Dinner Theater’s 42nd Street,  the National Tap Dance Company of Canada, as well as on noted television and film appearances.  He won a Ruth Page Award (200o) and last year was appointed Senior Advisor to the Beijing Contemporary Music Academy.  Oh, he’s also an expert on Morton Gould’s Tap Dance Concerto and designed a tap shoe for Leo’s Dancewear.  Holy cramp rolls, he’s busy! — and loving every minute of it.

Another accomplishment to add to the list is the 20th anniversary of Rhythm World a two-week extravaganza of tap that culminated in three JUBA! performances at the MCA (the MCA’s Director of Performance Programs Peter Taub is receiving a JUBA! Award for his “amazing vision and generosity”) .  The festival consisting of intensive residencies, workshops, master classes, kids programs, after-work adult courses, YTEC (youth), ProTEC (for professionals), UTEC (university student level) and ATEC (adults) wound up last weekend and was attended by students from around the world.  Saturday night’s sold-out show featured some of the masters themselves representing BAM!, Cartier Collective, Chicago Tap Theatre, Jump Rhythm Jazz Project, Jus’LisTeN and MADD Rhythms.  “This is a milestone, not just for the Human Rhythm Project, but for all baby tap institutions,” says Alexander.  “Tap dancers are starting to finally get around to the business of building infrastructure.”

RB spoke with Alexander about reaching the 20-year mark, his career and his thoughts on the future of foot drumming.

RB:  Congratulations – 20 years for the festival!  Is it 20 years for the company as well?

LA:  Well, we have a resident performance and education ensemble that is sort of like Ravinia has the orchestra in residence…in this case it’s the Human Rhythm Project that is 20 years old. The performance ensemble actually started in 2004.  The Human Rhythm Project started in 1988 as a tap and modern dance repertory company called am/FM with Kelly Michaels.  The Human Rhythm Project was just going to be one annual event of our season.  So the Project started in 1990 – Kelly passed away in 1995.  He had been very sick for many years.  Between 1990 and 1995 the repertory company got less and less busy and the Human Rhythm Project got more and more busy.  So when he passed away, the repertory company stopped and the HRP became the organization.  That’s sort of the genesis.

RB:  What made you want to put on a festival?

LA:  I had danced for a tap repertory company called Austin on Tap and a second rep company called the National Tap Dance Company of Canada in Toronto and had toured all over the world with them…and I’d done equity musical theater with 42^nd Street, so I thought I knew how to tap dance.  And then I went to a tap festival in Portland, Oregon in 1988 called the Portland International Tap Dance Festival.

The two roots of tap are African and Irish.  Most of the tap that I had done came more out of the European “tap as theater” tradition as opposed to the African “tap as drumming – as music”.  Syncopation is king.  This festival I went to in Portland was really more in the African tap genre, where presentation was important, but second to the complexity of the rhythms.  Improvisation was a huge component of it, whereas the repertory companies were all about choreography.  So, it was like, “oh ok — there’s more!”.

RB:  A whole new world…

LA:  Right.  It was a whole new world — and the realization that you never know how to tap dance because it’s always evolving.  There were these amazing soloists…the human body being a mallet.  Every mallet is completely different, so they all develop techniques that are unique based on the construction of their own mallet.  So you get all these very strange tangents, with a central theme, but completely different approaches.  I think more so even than contemporary or certainly ballet, because it is very eccentric.  It’s built on the different human instruments.  It was really eye-opening and I thought, “We should have one in Chicago.”

The project (HRP) is actually to bring people together using tap dance as the vehicle.  In the late 80s, there was sort of a tap renaissance that started in the 70s…not renaissance, but a reformation in the 70s that led to a joint resolution by the US House and Senate.  In 1989 it was signed by George HW Bush…and proclaimed May 25th to be National Tap Dance Day because it’s Bill Robinson’s birthday, so celebrating the legacy of one of tap’s greatest icons, but also, for me this was the even more important part, that tap dance has roots in African and Irish cultures, and that it is a byproduct of a cultural collision and a positive byproduct.  To me, that was just it!  Between the revelation at the tap festival, the proclamation of the US House and Senate and the fact that there really wasn’t a “scene” here in Chicago helped to provide the impetus for starting it.

RB:  I love how mainstream tap is finally becoming.  When I was growing up, it was just Gregory Hines in White Nights or maybe on tv.  What is The American Rhythm Center?

LA:  This is our dream.  Generally speaking, there’s almost no infrastructure for tap dance in the United States.  You touched on it when you said White Nights, because tap dance has a life in commercial theater, whether it’s in Broadway, film, or Riverdance…it gives the impression that it’s alive and well, but there’s no structure behind it.  Those are just shows that come and go.  Whereas the modern dancers took over academia and the ballet dancers have always been supported by cultural elite – and I don’t say that in a bad way, because sometimes that is used as a put down – but the elite.  I’ve heard people say that Chicago will not be a world-class city unless we have a major ballet repertory company and that was the support that brought the Joffrey here.

The modern dancers were smart.  They said, “we are important”, they went into academia, and they created a whole national network.  Every dance program in the US is basically contemporary-based, so kids who study tap…grow up and at 18 they finish and they look around and there’s nowhere to go.  The American Rhythm Center is our plan to develop the first cultural center in the US dedicated to American tap and contemporary percussive arts and affiliated percussive dance like Irish, African, Indian Kathak, flamenco.  Almost every culture in the world has some form of foot stomping, foot drumming.  Truth be told, percussive dance is the oldest art form.  American tap is the most contemporary of all the foot stomping dances done.  If anything should be tied to a university, it should be our roots.  It would be like if every English department only taught Shakespeare.  We’re also working with a college and university, to get an academic partner to make it a more complete part of their ongoing dance curriculum either in a dance or music department, because we really belong in music as much as we do in dance.  It’s about rhythmic composition, not just special composition.

I’m senior advisor to the Beijing Contemporary Music Academy and I’m going there two more times this year and I’ll be there four months next year.  I’m working with the ministry of culture and the ministry of education to create a formal curriculum for teaching tap dance in China!  They’re in the central planning for now, so I will develop the curriculum for China.  We don’t have a curriculum for tap in the United States.  It’s so much an oral tradition still,  which is an impediment for building an institution.  There’s so much work to be done.

RB:  Do you have an estimate for when the center will come to fruition?

LA:  Our recently completely strategic plan – it is board approved – is between three and five years.

RB:  Do you have a location?

LA:  We have what may be the first phase of the center, which is sort the capacity-building phase where we open a school and develop a large student base which will generate a revenue base that allows us to also start a capitol campaign and move on to the cultural center idea.

RB:  Please tell me a little about the Gould piece.

LA:  The tap dance concerto?  It was written in 1952.  It was composed by Morton Gould.  He worked with a tap dancer named Danny Daniels who is still alive and lives in Los Angeles.  They did collaborate to a certain extent.  Gould relied on him to provide certain rhythmic motifs and incorporated it into the score.  There are four movements.  It’s built along the lines of a classic concerto.  Just like a violin or piano concerto and the tap dancers is treated like a snare drum.  All of the rhythms were notated.  There is a cadenza in the first movement, which gives the artist a chance to improvise.  Gould said that for the rest of the piece, so long as the rhythmic conversation, or point/counterpoint and sometimes doing the exactly same rhythm as the orchestra is doing…so long as you don’t rupture that, you can improvise within the whole piece.  Mostly you wanted to display the tap dancer as a musician.

RB:  When was the last time you performed it?

LA:  I still do it.  I did it last year a couple of times with different orchestras.  Although I’m getting to the point where I’m teaching it to a couple of members of BAM! because some of it is really…there are leaps and turns, especially the leaps…it doesn’t feel like it used to.  It can be modified.

RB:  And you received a Ruth Page Award?

LA:  It’s hanging on my wall.  It was for Outstanding Contribution to the Field.  It was for the work related to the Human Rhythm Project.

RB:  And you designed a tap shoe — the Concerto — for Leo’s.  I assume it was named after the piece you’re famous for.  How did that come about?

LA:  For the most part, tap shoes are designed to meet the needs of dance studios that go to competitions and stand on their toes, etc.  A lot of times they’re designed for dancers to point their toes instead of the quality of sound that the shoe produces and the durability of the shoe for serious dancers.  I felt there was a large and growing group of tap dancers that weren’t being served by the product.  The shoes didn’t sound good.  So I went to Leo’s Dancewear and talked to them about developing a shoe that was actually an instrument.

RB:  Regular taps or jingle?

LA:  Regular.

RB:  Thank you for justifying my preference.  Who were your idols growing up?

LA:  I started tap dance as a little boy, when I was eight, I only did it for a year and then studied drumming with my stepfather.  So I was really more of a trained percussionist than a tap dancer. When I was in college, I decided to go back to dance.  It wasn’t like I was dancing for all of my formative years and was in that culture, so my tap idols really didn’t happen until I was older.  Donald O’Connor.  I thought he was absolutely underrated and overshadowed by other people of the time.  I thought he was a brilliant dancer as well as performer and comedian.  In his dance there was humor.

RB:  The “Make ‘Em Laugh” scene from Singin’ in the Rain…

LA:  It was all about Donald O’Connor.  In terms of more contemporary artists, I’d say Diane Walker and Sam Weber, who have been with the festival every year for twenty years.  They’re both being honored this year with our JUBA! Award.  Diane is being awarded because of her impeccable phrasing and tone and elegance, and Sam because, I think more than anybody, he really has taken a technical idea and taken it so far out.  He took the whole field to an entirely different place because of his technique.  He just developed this amazing minimalist technique of really extend and release and the number of notes that can be achieved by this relaxation and hip manipulation.  It really is a technique and it’s being emulated all over the world.

RB:  Who were some of your percussion idols?

LA:  Buddy Rich.

RB:  What exactly does your appointment in Beijing entail?

LA:  It’s a ten-year appointment as a senior advisor to develop a four-year comprehensive curriculum for a university.  After that the development for high school and elementary and then, if I’m still engaged at that point, to help to create something for the general public just for fun.

RB:  Is there a tap culture in China?

LA:  There absolutely is.  Some movies made it through the censor.  Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson’s movies made it through – Fred Astaire’s were not.  Nobody there knows who Fred Astaire is.  Just like what happened in China happened in other parts of the world and the movies became source material.  It’s sort of like seeing this much of a painting and basing a whole technique on that little picture.  I think some of the most interesting work is being done in South America and Europe.

RB:   Why?

LA:  I think they are more steeped in their own cultural traditions and they’re multi-dimensional artists.  Right now American tap dancers are obsessed with rhythm and the complexity of the rhythm.  I think some of the South American artists bring a lot more theatrical craft to the form.  Big ideas and they’re sort of post-modern tap.

RB:  What is your favorite tap step?

LA: (Laughing)  I don’t think I’ve discovered it yet.  I’m still finding new things.  I found a new tap…what class was I torturing?…it was Tuesday night and I found a new push-drop-pull that I’d never done before.  It’s kind of funky physically, but I think when I practice it and get it up to speed, it’s going to be really cool.